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The year 1997 witnessed a major malaise develop in the regional economy. The last half of 1997 saw one of the worst financial crises in the history of postwar Asian economies. In particular, some outstanding players in the economic growth race in East Asia were badly infected by an economic growth virus. The immediate impact of Asia's financial crisis is more accurately confined to Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand-five East Asian countries hardest hit. The immediate impact of the financial crisis was to put severe downward pressure on currencies of many countries in Southeast Asia. A development that contributed to the surge in capital inflows to the East Asian countries in the early to mid-1990s was the decline in asset yields in industrial countries.

In this article, we argue that there are strong reasons for using linear instead of exponential models when analysing post-war economic growth. Incorrect model specifications will lead to misinterpretations of the underlying economic reality and to erroneous economic forecasts. Our argument is based on an empirical investigation of real Gross Domestic Product per capita growth in 25 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (and three country aggregates) during the post-war period using the Box-Cox transformation method. The conclusion is that per capita growth is generally (more or less) linear (and definitely not exponential) for the level of economic development represented by these countries. Based on this we argue that analyses of growth should use linear instead of exponential models. This change of model could give new insights into problems connected with economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the benefits and costs associated with renewable energy. Although the reduction in cost of renewable energy has been demonstrated, its market penetration has been limited with respect to past projections, except for hydropower. Global environmental concerns with respect to emissions of carbon dioxide and other gree-house effect gasses, should exert pressure on governments in the industrialized countries to encourage generation of power using environmentally sound technologies and micro-power supply sources. This article explains the methodology of life cycle analysis and its application to the energy sector to arrive to estimates of environmental externalities, whose implicit costs are then compared with the costs generally passed on to the consumer.

The ability of any government to raise revenue by taxation is a fundamental part of its constitution, and many historical constitutional changes have been driven by taxation issues. Taxation is not only a major source of revenue for governments of industrialised countries. It is also used, in combination with transfer payments, to influence the inequality of incomes. Tax systems may also have unintended consequences for inequality. It is therefore not surprising that taxation is continually subject to heated debate. The recent debate regarding tax reform in Australia is just one example that serves to illustrate how complicated the issues are and how strongly people sometimes disagree about the appropriate policy.